The Frozen West
by Cozy Mark IV
Summary: A young griffon follows his hero, Daring Do, to become an archeologist.


The Frozen West

Martin was still a young child, barely eight years out of the egg, but he was bright for his age. His family wasn't well to do rich, but his father was a land owner, and he had grown up around other griffins and ponies on the family's lush green plantation. He already knew how to tend the livestock, and how to harvest the grains and wheat, but his real love was adventure. One of the family's hired ponies had a chest of old books that had been in her family for more generations than she could remember, and though the pages were brittle and faded with great age, the story they told about the adventures of a mare called 'Daring Do' inspired his imagination with fantastic tales of adventures in some other world.

He got his first taste on his ninth birthday when his father invited him along on a trip to the west to harvest ice. His family, like most plantations this close to the west, maintained a large barn where huge blocks of ice, each the height of a griffin and at least as wide, were kept packed in straw year round to restock the ice boxes and make ice cream. There were griffins whose families made their living hauling ice to the burning east, using teams of ponies to make the long trek, and indeed their farm's proximity to one of the great east-west roads was the only reason they could find ponies to take on the hard labor around the farm. A healthy pony could demand a high wage anywhere, as their strength and raw muscle for farming were unmatched, and being such a small minority, they were always in high demand.

It was mid-June when he had set out with his father and twelve enclosed carts with twelve ponies to pull them, while four griffons led the way pulling the supply cart. Little Martin wheeled overhead, fighting the cold wind that blew endlessly from the west as he scouted their path. Their progress had been good for the first week, but as they left the green lands further behind, the road degraded from a well-worn path, to a dirt track, and then to a mere rut winding between the low hills of scrubby tundra in the blowing snow. By the middle of the second week they had reached their destination, a valley where a small glacier pushed down from the frozen west. The team had set to work with the two-griffon drills and the gunpowder, drilling holes and then blasting the ice loose to be cut into more manageable pieces with the huge two-griffon saws.

On their third day at the ice fields, Martin had grown bored of watching them working and been exploring around the campsite when he stumbled across it. Downstream of the glacier where the ice was broken and beginning to melt, he saw something sticking out of the ice, something that wasn't a rock.

He took to the air and landed next to it, and upon closer inspection it turned out to be a piece of cut timber, not a tree, but a board. His father had dismissed this area as being 'too contaminated' to yield good ice, but at the time he hadn't understood what he meant, so now he began exploring in earnest. As he followed the melt path down into the valley more beams and posts turned up, some round, others square as well as small planks of wood that looked almost like shingles from a roof.

Though he was still young, he was not an ignorant country griffon. His father had friends in the cities to the east and had seen to it Martin received a good education. He knew as well as any that the lands to the west never knew spring, just ice and snow that only got colder as one continued to the west. To the east, the temperature rose as the sun climbed in the sky, and if one kept going far enough, past the great desert, eventually the boiling sea would be reached. On the edge of the great desert, the old cities had stood for more than a thousand years, since the beginning of recorded history, and now in this new industrial age they turned out one new invention after another: Steam engines, metal castings, farming machines, even engines that ran on burning oil.

According to everything he had learned, this shouldn't be here. The great griffon civilizations were far to the east where it was warmer. No one could live in this frozen wasteland, nor could he see why anyone would want to. Had he stumbled onto some ice miners' shack then?

His curiosity peaked, the nine-year-old griffin continued climbing over the great boulders of ice, and inside a deep fissure he spied something that looked like the shattered remains of a brick chimney. Sinking his claws into the face of the ice, he carefully slid down slope, expecting to find, perhaps the battered remains of an ice shack. After looking around the modest ice cave for several minutes, his unease had gradually grew as he surveyed the wreckage. Something definitely didn't make sense here. The building was far too large to be a simple ice shack; he found the remains of glass windows, the base of a large fireplace, and ash. So much ash! Someone would have had to burn wood for months on end, and at an incredible rate to produce such amounts... It just didn't make sense. Wood commanded a steep price this far to the west, so far beyond the last forests. His brow knotted in confusion as he asked himself; 'What kind of rich fool would build a house on the western glaciers and haul tons of wood to heat it?'

Lost in thought, he almost missed it among the rest of the twisted debris. It was a piece of cloth frozen into the ice, snaking sideways though the wall. Martin took out his spare chisel and began digging, and to his surprise, this ice seemed to give way easily. In a few moments he knew he was looking at a blanket, and as he dug deeper something cracked, and a large cascade of black slush and ice burst from the face he had been chiseling on, soaking his back paws and making him shiver.

As the torrent of ice water spent itself, he looked around at the black, ash stained water and stopped cold as he saw it. A frozen hoof, peeking out of a blanket.

He screamed and scrambled out of the crevice, but in the desolate ice field no one heard anything, and he was left to himself, sitting on the top of the ice for some minutes, panting and trying to get his racing heart under control.

After a few minutes he was able to calm down, but rather than go running to his father who would have asked why he had been poking around in such a deep fissure, he decided to go back for a second look, if only to be sure of what he thought he had seen.

The water had drained away through the rocky soil and though he dared not approach, there was now no doubt as to what he saw. The blankets must once have been brightly colored, and there were at least of dozen of them that had once been wrapped around the sight before him. It was not just one lone hoof he had seen. With the water gone and the blankets torn away he could see their desiccated features and the sight filled him with a deep and pervasive dread. This was not just one lone ice miner. The hoof he saw was wrapped around a smaller pony, probably his wife and clutched between them was a single tiny form, its limp tail hanging down between its parents' hooves.

He climbed out of the crevice and slowly made his way back to the camp, trying to make sense of it all. What insanity would drive someone to build a home in the great ice fields? What fool would bring his family to such a desolate place? His father had no answers for him, but their team did retrieve the poor family and give them a decent burial before turning for home, their carts now loaded high with ice.

…

Almost twenty years had passed since that trip. Martin had finished his schooling, gone on to college, and followed the trail blazed by his fictional hero into a career in archeology. Now after an exhaustive campaign to raise the necessary funding, his expedition to the west was finally setting out, seeking answers to the questions he had been asking for almost two decades.

His find in the ice field had not been as unusual as he had thought; there were countless tales of bizarre finds in the western ice, but mixed in with the true finds were tales of myth and legend, clouding the true picture.

Expeditions had gone west before, and many did not come back. Those that did reported that the snow storms only grew in strength the further west they went and that they had no choice but to turn back.

However, there was an exception. One team had lost most of their griffons and all of their equipment, but one lone griffon from the party had survived, limping into an ice mining camp and collapsing from exposure. He had lost most of his claws to frost bite, and more than a few thought the cold had damaged his mind, but _what a story_ he told: He reported that after pushing on further than anyone else, the snow storms had begun to slacken, and encouraged by this, the team had pressed on for days by lantern light until finally a break in the storm allowed them to see the sky which is all but invisible in the west. He reported seeing tiny lights scattered across the black sky, like fireflies, but very faint and far away. Most academics dismissed this description as the addled mind of a half frozen adventurer.

Only now with the invention and perfection of the airship could an expedition to the western pole be seriously considered, and after years of work, he and his team were determined to find out what, if anything, lay beyond the veil of the western snow storms.

Their group was a small one, just three other griffons and himself, a necessary concession that kept the weight of supplies, fuel and parts low enough for their airship to rise into the upper winds. While the wind at the ground always blew steadily from the west to the east, tests with weather balloons had revealed that above a certain altitude the winds reversed direction, carrying hot moist air from the boiling sea westward towards the cold and the dark. If this height could be reached, the powerful winds would carry them swiftly towards the west pole.

With the anchor lines cast off, the long, streamlined ship shot up into the sky, and in under two hours they were headed west at a terrific speed of many hundreds of miles an hour. The cabin for the four of them was little more than a heavily insulated box tucked inside the sleek elliptical balloon, and as the ground rolled by below them, they all settled in for the ride, admiring the view while they could. In a single twenty-hour day they had cleared the last major settlement, and the landscape was becoming rapidly more bleak an uninviting below them as the sun slowly sank in the sky. As the first glaciers made their appearance, Marten asked his colleague Doctor Frank what he thought they might find as they traveled further west than anyone had ever been.

"You mean the myths of some ancient yeti civilization in the snow?" he laughed. "I would love to find such a prize, but I seriously doubt it exists. The snow that drives the glaciers would wipe away any trace of buildings or anything else really. And that's without asking the obvious problem of what such creatures would eat in a land where nothing grows."

Knock, their mechanic asked. "What is it you expect to find, sir?"

Martin laughed. "You'll think me an old romantic, but now that it's just the four of us? I am secretly hoping to find something new. I don't know what, but perhaps there are secrets to the west that even we know nothing of."

They laughed of course, but he was among friends and didn't mind the ribbing.

The hours slipped slowly by, as did the seemingly endless glaciers underneath them. They had chosen their takeoff point carefully to avoid areas known for their bad storms, but they still had to fly through snow for several days as the increasing cold wrung the water from the air around them.

When the snow finally cleared after days of riding the currents, the four of them looked out to see nothing but blackness. Switching on the new electric lights showed the glacier below them, but they could see that they had lost a great deal of altitude in the freezing air and their speed had fallen off to less than a hundred miles per hour as the great eastward winds spent themselves in the cold wastes, cooling and falling before beginning the long trip back towards the sea.

"The winds still seem to be blowing us along at seventy miles an hour or so." Doctor Frank confirmed after taking measurements and using his slide rule. "We should wait until our speed drops below twenty before we light the engines. We brought as much fuel as we could, but we are already further west than anyone has gone before. If we run out, we will surely join those poor souls frozen in the ice below us."

"Agreed, we should still have day or two of free travel at this rate before-"

Martin was cut off by a shout from outside the airlock style door of the room. Their physician, Doctor Mason, had climbed up into the biting cold on the flimsy rope ladder that ran to the top of the balloon and was yelling and pointing at something. They all hurriedly bundled up and clamored up the ladder to join him on top of the balloon, and what they saw there stunned them into silence.

Stretched out from horizon to horizon, the black sky was studded with not hundreds, but tens of thousands of tiny white lights tinkling in the bitter cold.

"Son of a... he was telling the truth!"

"Frank, you have any idea what those are?"

"You got me... Anything that high would have to be blown about by the winds like our weather balloons..."

They all stared, but none of the lights moved, not even a little bit. Martin tried his pocket telescope, but it didn't seem to bring any of the lights into focus or make them any clearer.

"I don't know what they are, but they seem to be immune to my telescope... Doc, why don't you get some pictures? I'm going back inside, it's way too cold out here."

…

Over the next several days their ship gradually slowed, and they were forced to finally play their torches over the engines to heat them before bringing them both to life with many a cough and sputter. With the propellers now pushing their craft ahead, they knew exactly how long they could run them before having to turn around, and though it should be enough to get them to the pole, this was uncharted territory, and they were all nervous.

Below them the glaciers gradually shrank and became less common as mountain peaks began to break through the layers of ice. As the crew slept, the ice sheets thinned still further and eventually disappeared, leaving them a startling discovery when they woke.

Doc Frank's shout jarred the other three from a sound sleep. "_Holy shit_! Is that what I think it is?!"

They all crawled from their bunks to gather around the portholes in the bottom of the balloon. Below them, to their utter astonishment was a forest. Dead and barren now, without a trace of green, but a forest none the less. Martin swung into action.

"Knock, bring the engines to an idle, I don't want them going out in this cold, we had a hard enough time starting them as it was. Frank? Start venting some of the gas and look for an open patch to set us down in. We have got to see this."

Knocks, their mechanic and resident engineer, couldn't help but wonder aloud. "How in _bloody blazes_ did a forest grow in the middle of the frozen west? The temperature hasn't been above freezing here in at least the thousand years we've been around to keep records!"

"Uh... I think I might have a way to answer that..." Mason answered as he turned to face them, looking like he was about to faint.

"How?"

Mason swallowed hard. "We could ask the natives."

…

Spread out below them was a city. As insane as it was, there was no other way to describe it.

After much debate, the team set the airship down at one end of a large main street that ran between the buildings, many of which were ten or twenty stories tall. The landing was made easier by the absence of even a light breeze. The great winds had long ago spent themselves, and now the frigid air hung absolutely still around them, its temperature having fallen to nearly one hundred degrees below zero C.

The team had prepared for this, and now dawned their re-breathers, goggles and extreme cold weather gear as they got up the nerve to step outside. The gear would keep them alive in the extreme cold, but it also meant they couldn't fly as their wings would freeze within seconds of exposure.

If they had expected a welcome party, they were disappointed. Some force had blown or desiccated all the snow from this city countless ages ago, and aside from the near total darkness and extreme cold, it looked almost like some of the cities of the east. With no snow to crunch underfoot, the stillness of the air and the total silence gave them all an uneasy feeling. They could feel it in their bones.

Something was not right here.

This city shouldn't exist.

It _couldn't exist!_

Yet, here they were.

As they stepped out of the ship, their flashlights illuminated a small area around the ship, but lacked the power to show much beyond ten or fifteen feet. The buildings that towered overhead and the long street behind them remained shrouded in darkness.

"I say we stick together and try exploring that first building there." Knock suggested, indicating an eight story brick building.

"Agreed."

The door opened without resistance, and the four of them played their flashlights over the darkened interior of the building. Shelves stacked with merchandise lined the walls, and a cash register sat at a desk by the door, looking ready for use at a moment's notice. Doc Frank examined the writing and frowned behind his mask.

"This isn't some ancient script. I recognize this. It's an old pony dialect. Martin, this language hasn't been used like this in more than a thousand years!"

The ramifications of that slowly sunk in.

"What does it say?" Martin asked quietly.

"'Berghoof's Department Store, Manehattan. Register number three'."

Martin was getting the shivers just standing there, shivers that had nothing to do with the intense cold. "Let's try another building. I think the one across the plaza might be an apartment building."

The four griffons crossed back over the plaza, the soft idle of their ship's engines the only sound to be heard. Unconsciously they all found themselves trying to be quiet, as though the stillness did not like to be disturbed.

The next building was indeed an apartment complex, but unlike the pristine shop, this building's door refused to open until Martin removed a crowbar from his pack and pried. The doors splintered and fell from their hinges, showering the ground with wooden chips that sounded like hard tile as they hit and bounced. As their flashlights illuminated the inside, they saw that the front desk had been ransacked, and a trail of debris led around the corner and down a flight of stairs. The group carefully descended the stairs, and as their flashlights illuminated the basement there was a sharp and universal intake of breath.

Bodies. Dozens of them. Frozen ponies huddled together under blankets in what had apparently been a last-ditch attempt to stay warm. The ash spread around the floor and the empty fuel baskets attested to a fire that had burned and given light and warmth up until the very end. Where their faces were left uncovered by blankets, bare eye sockets could be seen, the moisture in their eyes having long since sublimated away, desiccating them like mummies. One face seemed to be looking in their direction, and the beams of their flashlights made it look as though the mare was staring at them across the vast gulf of time between them.

The four of them ran from the building, but in the dark they chose the wrong exit and found themselves in an alley behind the apartment. It took several minutes, but eventually they calmed down enough to speak again.

"This place tain't no city. 'Tis a tomb." Knock whispered quietly.

"It certainly looks that way. Those poor ponies must not have had time to get out."

"I'm more worried about that door..." Martin said quietly.

"What about it?"

"It wasn't stuck. Someone barricaded themselves in that building to hide... from something out here..."

The rest of them looked around nervously until Knock suddenly laughed. "I, and whatever it was probably froze along with them more than a thousand years ago. I wouldn't worry if I were you."

"Wait, what makes you think this happened a thousand years ago?" Doc Frank asked.

"Well, ya don't have to be a genius, now do you? Our written records only go back a little over a thousand years, to the time of the great storm. So whenever these ponies lived, it had to have been before that."

"Okay, I can follow that much, but how in the world could they ever have lived at all in this cold?"

Knock thought about that for a moment. "Well, I suppose the sun must have shone here at some point in the distant past."

"What?! If the sun were shining here, then all griffon lands would be either frozen or burned to ash, and that obviously didn't happen." Doc Mason protested.

Knock seemed to be thinking hard, and when he spoke, he had the most ridiculous idea any of them had ever heard.

"What if the world were to spin? You know, like a top, so every side gets some heat and some cold?"

Doc Frank and Mason both enjoyed a good laugh over the mechanic's simplicity.

"Oh, that is a good one. 'What if it spun?' Ha!"

"I'm sorry Knock, he doesn't mean to be rude, but surely you know how the sky works? The moon goes around the world and shows one face to us, and our world stands off and shows one face to the sun. A world can most definitely not _spin_. Why, it would be undignified." he added as an afterthought.

Knock frowned behind his mask and pointed a gloved finger skyward at the glowing pinpoints of light. "All right then. Where do those fit into your view of the sky?"

Their laughter died on their lips as they followed his gaze.

After a long silence, Martin spoke up. "Why don't we try to find our way back to the ship? I don't know about you, but this place still gives me the creeps..."

As they stepped out of the alleyway, they noticed a dim but growing light on the horizon, and looking up, they were surprised to see the moon illuminating the cityscape around them with a dim glow.

"Good, now we can see where we're going." Knock groused, switching off his flashlight to save the battery. "I think the airship is around this building here."

However, before they had taken more than a few steps, Doc Frank called out in a shaky voice. "Does... Does anyone else see that?"

They all stopped cold and followed his pointed claw to something that they had taken to be a statue. As they hesitantly closed the distance and played their flashlights across the thing, they suddenly knew it was no statue.

The pony was frozen solid, just like the others they had found in the basement, but something had broken the head off after death. Martin shone his light on the head and they all gasped.

Something had mutilated the body.

The ponies face was as mummified as the rest they had seen, but something had worked this one over with a crude knife, pulling the lips back in a hideous grin, and as they looked back to the body, they could now see that one hoof was forever frozen in the act of pointing at a spot in the sky.

Doc Mason confirmed their fears. "This... was done before the pony died... Someone dragged him out here and posed him like this after he died of exposure..." His voice shook as he spelled it out. "In a frozen wasteland like this, no one could survive for long, but look at him. He doesn't have anything to protect himself from the cold. Someone or something must have been... hunting them even as the cold seeped into their homes."

This time they all shivered as they looked around in fear.

"Let's get out of here." Martin said, trying not to sound panicked.

The group walked around the building and into a small courtyard. They might have walked right past it if Knock hadn't seen it and jumped a foot in the air.

In the center of the courtyard stood another pony, a mare this time with that same hideous forced grin that had been inflicted with a knife. Her empty eye sockets still peered at the place she pointed to in the sky with her hoof.

They all shuddered and backed away from the hideous frozen statue, but before they could move on, a low sound, like an endless intake of breath seemed to surround them, rooting them all to the ground as they frantically looked for the source. The soft sigh rose to a hiss, and as they watched, the frozen corpse before them began to glow.

"Holy shit! What is-"

At the sound of his voice, the hiss became a banshee scream and the glow resolved itself into the form of a pony looking very much as the pony must have looked in life. Ghost would be too kind a term to describe what now faced them. Ghost implies black and white, a dim recollection of life gone by. The figure before them looked exactly as she had in life, save only that she was now translucent, the buildings behind her showing though. Death had apparently not been kind to the mare.

"YOU CAN'T MAKE ME LOOK! I WON'T LOOK EVER AGAIN!" The apparition shrieked at them as it lunged forward, only to be brought up short by a glowing ethereal chain and collar that seemed to be anchored to the corpse it emerged from.

The pony before them had _no eyes_. Not the desiccated sockets of a corpse, no. Fresh blood ran from her eye sockets as though she had recently gouged out her own eyes rather than see anymore. She thrashed at the end of the glowing chain that bound her to her corpse screaming at the source of the voice she could not see. "I WON"T LOOK! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME ANYMORE!"

The gunshot echoed through the night, and the corpse's head splintered into a thousand pieces while the glowing chain snapped. As they watched, the mare seemed to fade, becoming more transparent until she disappeared altogether, leaving an expanding ripple in darkness around them though she had fallen into deep water.

Knock slowly lowered his black powder pistol as they all tried to catch their breath.

"What... what in the five kingdoms was that?!" Martin finally managed.

Dr. Mason answered in hushed tones. "That was some of the most powerful magic I have ever seen."

"Did we just see... a ghost?" Dr. Frank asked in hushed tones.

"I believe you just saw that poor pony's soul... And if Knock is right about the age of this place... She may have been trapped like that for... for more than a thousand years."

The group shuddered at the thought.

"I guess someone wanted to have somepony around to talk to..." Knock murmured, the alarm growing in his voice. "Somepony who would be there century after century..."

"Just like they were!" Martin finished in a near panicked whisper. "She obviously thought we were someone else! Someone who's still around!"

They all looked over their shoulders as the eerie silence set in again. As loud as the screaming had been, Knock's gunshot had to have been the first thunderclap this place had heard in a millennium. If anything still lived in this city...

"Come on, let's get out of here!" Doc Frank insisted in an urgent whisper.

"What should we do if we find another of those... things?" Knock asked, gesturing to the frozen corpse with a shudder.

"We do just what you did. Break the body and free the poor thing to move on. It's the only thing we can do." Doc Mason replied sadly.

They continued on down the street, only to find it sloping downward to end abruptly between two more apartment buildings. Martin was not about to go back the way they had come, and when the doors failed to open, his crowbar once more gained them entrance to the building. A quick glance around showed this had been a service entrance someone had barricaded as best they could, and it didn't take much to figure out what they would find if they followed the trail of ash and debris downstairs.

"Come on, this looks like the way up." Doc Frank whispered urgently as he bounded up the stairs.

The group burst through the locked door at the top of the stairs and back out into the open street. As they turned to keep running, a voice from behind them froze them all to the spot.

"Hello?"

A dim light shown across their backs as they slowly turned to face it.

It was another mutilated corpse, its wide grin and sightless eyes fixed on a different point in the black sky. This one however, couldn't have been more than a child. As they watched in horror, the glow resolved itself into the form of a translucent orange foal, her straight purple mane falling over her eye as though she were trying to hide behind it. As she caught sight of their strange masks and blank goggles she gave a yelp of fear and tried to run, only to be pulled up short by the glowing collar and chain that trapped her beside her frozen body.

They could only stare as the translucent orange foal began to break down and sob. "I just want to see my Mom... Please... it's been so long! Please, just let me go to my Mom and Dad!"

The little foal got up and walked towards the doorway they had just come from until her chain snapped taut. "Please! They're inside! I just want to see them again! Please let me go inside! Let me see my Mom!"

The little foal strained against the glowing white chain that trapped her by her body, pulling and yanking her immaterial form against it without effect as she cried and her tears fell and splashed softly on the hard street that would have frozen any real water in an instant. Doc Mason stepped forward and slowly pulled the pistol from its holster.

In an instant, the little foal figured it out and a look of stark terror gripped her as she leaped at him. "No! Please don't kill me! I'll be good, I swear! I just want my Mom! Please just let me see my Mom!

The chain was just long enough for her to reach him, but her body passing right through him.

"Please! I don't want to die! Please don't do this! I want my Mom! Please just let me see-"

The tiny head with its mutilated grin exploded in a cloud of shards as the gun went off. The chain holding the little foal snapped, and she immediately began to fade, frantically flailing as her struggles sent ripples through the very darkness around them.

"_No! Mommy!_" Her cries faded and soon vanished as the icy stillness returned to the empty street.

The four of them just stood there for several minutes trying to process what they had just seen and done.

Martin had to remove his goggles and he and the others frantically attempted to scrape the ice and fog off the insides of the lenses before their eyes froze up. The goggles had not been designed for tears.

At length, Knock spoke up in a shaky voice, trying to offer his reassurance. "You did the right thing Mason."

The griffin sniffed behind his mask, his voice still shaking. "Maybe so... but I hope I never have to do that again."

Martin shook himself. "Come on, whatever did this could still be out here. The ship is just around that building there. Let's get out of here!"

They ran around the corner and found themselves looking down the same long street they had landed on, and two blocks down sat the airship, still idling in the moonlight just where they had left it. Buildings flashed past on either side as they ran down the street. In the middle of the road, trees and small structures dotted what had once been a wide medium strip between two lanes of traffic traveling in opposite directions. They were only a block away when they saw the glow ahead of them in the moonlight, not a small dim glow this time, but a bright swath of light right across the road that nearly blinded them after so long in the dark.

They skidded to a halt, their path to the ship blocked by the sight before them.

Foals. Hundreds of them. They had been placed in neat rows across the street, each with a hideous grin carved into their frozen face and each with a hoof forever frozen in the act of pointing at the sky like someone's sick idea of an astronomy class.

As they watched, frozen in terror, the light before them resolved itself into hundreds of translucent foals in matching school uniforms who all turned towards them and bowed until their faces scraped the street.

"_All hail Nightmare Moon!"_


End file.
